The Poor Are Stupid

In the first of a two part series, A. Shaw explains how, like their Tory predecessors, Labour’s education policy is designed not to confront a discrimination that begins in the classroom - but to justify it.

‘Nature or nurture’ is a cyclical question that goes to the heart of politics in any epoch. Entire philosophies, fascism and communism for example, are almost entirely based on coming down firmly on one side or the other. One might assume New Labour, despite the gnashing of teeth since their election, would nonetheless fall fairly comfortably inside the camp of the good guys. One would be wrong.

Government policies across a range of issues - welfare, crime, housing or education all point to the same startling conclusion: Labour has not just abandoned socialism, but at heart a belief in democracy itself. Emboldened by this subliminal message, it is the new Labour storm troopers, the triumphalist middle classes, rather than fulminating old colonels in the letters pages of the Telegraph who are thinking, discussing, and occasionally broadcasting the unthinkable. “Film crews and investigative journalists are jamming into the sink estates and failing schools of the nation, and sending us back terrible reports about how the excluded are getting on. Three weeks ago for example the BBC screened The Eyes of a Child, which took a series of terrible cases of deprivation, and then made the claim “that these children speak for five million others. The implication was that some kind of massive redistribution was required” fumed outraged Independent columnist David Araanovitch. “Poverty” was, he went on to explain at length, “about far more than money.” He had, he insists, been poor himself and ‘it never did him any harm’. “Giving more money directly to the parents of children where there were no dads except criminal ones and mothers, feckless drug addicts” he pontificated “would be to simply line the pockets of pushers, publicans and betting shops in Bradford and Leicester. I cannot, (obviously confident in the knowledge that he wasn’t) have been the only one whose treacherous alter ego whispered “eugenics” into their minds ear. Are the poor like that because they’re poor?” he wondered. “Or are they poor because they’re like that?” (17.9.98)

Or as Donald Trump put it recently “My entire life, I’ve watched politicians bragging about how poor they are, how they came from nothing, how poor their parents and grandparents were. And I said to myself, if they can stay so poor for so many generations, maybe this isn’t the kind of person we want to elect to higher office. How smart can they be”

Strikingly similar sentiments underpin the New Labour mantra that ‘poverty is no excuse’ for bad schools. And if poverty is not an excuse, investment or lack of it, is not the solution. No point in throwing good money after bad if at the end of the day it is merely ‘a pointless exercise in social engineering’. After all any society no matter how egalitarian will ultimately be structured with a top a middle and a bottom. In brief the collapsing comprehensives will have to manage as best they can with what they have got. In any case aspiring middle class children, you know the ‘bright children’, should not be held back by having to share lessons with “budding Burglar Bills” was how one candid Guardian letter writer put it. But as always, the real issue revolves around who determines who the ‘bright ones’ are? “Paradoxically” as the London Evening Standard put it “bright children from deprived homes may have stood a better chance of getting to the best State schools when they could take the 11-plus’. (29. 11.99) Now so far as New Labour is concerned the estate agent is best placed to decide.

For all the obvious reasons, why some schools succeed and some fail, goes right to the heart of the debate on how and where British society as a whole is being steered. On the surface the problem is ‘trendy teaching methods according to everyone on the Right, a shortage of resources according to everybody on the Left, it’s the teachers (Ofsted), it’s Ofsted (teachers), it’s culture of low expectation, it’s an overdose of intervention (the teachers unions), it’s the abolition of grammar schools, the existence of private schools, the rigging of exam results, the shortage of nursery schools... and so on. And yet despite the intense debate, the real answer according to British reporter of the year Nick Davies “is torn like a fox between hounds”. “The banal reality” according to Davies “is that the single factor which more than any other determines a school’s performance is it’s intake - the children who go there.” A school that is based in a run down working class area will struggle with its children, while one based in an affluent middle class area will prosper. “It is a simple thing” according to Davies who conducted an investigation for the Guardian “and every teacher knows it.” (14.9.99)

Worse, the problem appears endemic. Of the 13.3 million children in Britain, on any available measure, 4.6 of them live in poverty, and they are all enrolled in schools. The evidence that poverty undermines education is overwhelming - and has been for years. Yet governments, particularly this one, deny it. By obscuring this simple reality “the public discourse on our schools” claims Davies “entered the realm of the absurd and became lost there.” The reason it could so easily do so, he might have added, is that the discourse on class entered the same realm first. And stayed there. As a consequence, the conflict over schools, mirrors perfectly the wider contradictions in society. No less than the Treasury in it’s fourth report on the modernisation of Britain’s tax and benefits system confirms it. On ‘difficult to let estates’ it reports primly, ‘one in four children gain no GCSE’s (the national average is one in 20) and rate of truancy is four times the average...There is considerable evidence that growing up in a family that has experienced financial difficulties, damages children’s educational performance’. The same report concludes that poverty has trebled since 1979 (now higher than Greece and Portugal) to the point where a third of Britain’s children now live below the poverty line. In Davies’ opinion “this torrent of poor children poured into the classroom at exactly the same time as standards of behaviour and achievement slumped”. The poverty deliberately created under Thatcher, invaded the comprehensive system like water flooding a ship, reaching into every weak point. Of course the poverty artificially created under Thatcher also created the notion of a burgeoning middle class; ‘middle England’, the social base on which New Labour vaingloriously sits. So even if it means over a third of the population are regularly born into a poverty they are more less or destined to stay in, far from dismantling it, Blair is, it appears, determined to see this state of affairs politically, socially and culturally consolidated. His 1997 battle cry of ‘Education, education education’ ought to have been one with a universal appeal. It was not. Nor was it intended to be. It was instead a pledge, not only to retain middle class privilege in education, but to enhance it at every possible opportunity.

Way back in the late 1960’s a ‘national comprehensive’ network of schools was created to supposedly provide a free secondary education for all students of all backgrounds. “It was an idea with a powerful anger behind it” Davies records. In particular “a disgust at the old two-tiered system in which children were segregated at 11: those most in need of education tipped into second-class schools with sparse resources and no sixth forms, while those who were most able were given more resources, and their own A-level classes. The second tier schools - the secondary moderns were stigmatised as were their pupils”. In the old two-tier system, as was intended, the middle classes tended to prosper while the working classes, as was expected, failed. However when middle class children too began to find themselves ‘stigmatised’ in secondary moderns, the comprehensives were immediately created for them instead. (Incidentally the all time champion of comprehensives was not in fact Shirley Williams as is commonly thought, but Margaret Thatcher, who when education secretary, created more of them than anyone else).

When in the 1980’s the middle classes began to whine that now the comprehensives were failing them, (or more accurately their kids were failing in them) Kenneth Baker hurriedly gave them private schools or ‘parental choice’ (which ended up much the same thing) as an alternative. (Politics apart, nothing could be more subversive after all; nothing more demoralising to the established order, than as a consequence of a level playing field, (even one levelled down) the middle classes were to do as badly as the offspring of the poor. Should such a catastrophe occur, all sorts of questions would begin to be asked of the contradictory structure of the society they were being groomed to enter). A genuine meritocracy could, when all’s said and done, prove a rather dangerous thing.

Yet according to Blair this is precisely what is happening: “the old establishment is being replaced by a new larger and more meritocratic middle class,” he chirps. Philip Gould, author of the Unfinished Revolution, and an important figure behind the 1997 Labour victory not only agrees, but goes as far as to suggest that the classless society has already arrived. For him “anachronistic classification… a relic of our class system” is now all that divides us. As he explains, in the “US this problem does not exist because both groups are described by the same middle-class designation, which is what I think should happen here.” (Guardian 24.9.98)

Without a doubt the middle class does appear to have increased. More visible certainly. Generally less apologetic. Louder. But where, if Gould is to be believed, have they all come from? John Goldthorpe, whose life’s study has been a study of class mobility; provides the stunningly emphatic answer. Studying two cohorts of children, one born in 1958 and the other in 1970, he found, against the odds, that the later group had slightly less class mobility than the earlier. The more people that get education, the lesser part education paradoxically plays in social mobility he found, Increasingly in Blair’s Britain people are employed and promoted on qualities ‘other than brain or qualifications’. Thus social mobility has been stalled partly because middle class children are no longer in risk of sliding down the social scale. Due to this buttressing first by Thatcherism, and now Blairism, one consequence Guardian columnist Polly Toynbee observes, is that these days the middle classes are better “equipped to cling on more successfully to what they’ve got. It is the less bright middle-class children who disproportionately consume the new university places: they have to be exceptionally stupid now to fall off the social ladder.” (25.1.99) So even with a university education “No one really thinks that the dustman’s daughter has the same chance in life as the doctor’s son” according to Toynbee.

An opinion supported by a recent revelation in the Independent, which claims that “drop out rates at universities are an astounding 40%... almost half of the students at a small number of universities are falling by the wayside after the first year... and the universities with the worst records are those with the highest proportion of students from deprived backgrounds”. (27.11.99)

“Statistics are often misleading but it’s nevertheless true that a middle class child leaving school with minimal exam results is three times more likely to find a white collar job than a working class child with the same qualifications” according to another report in the Observer (13.12.98). So far from more people climbing in to the middle class as Blair claims, in reality the profile of the middle class has bloated because so few are being thrown out. The exact opposite in other words to a meritocracy. Indeed so long as it’s not ‘pointless’ there appears to be room for social engineering in Blair’s Britain after all.

Which all helps explain why even while there still is vertical mobility there isn’t much of it, and what little there was is fast diminishing. In their book, A Class Act, Andrew Adonis and Stephen Pollard quote Chris Woodhead, the chief inspector of schools:’... the failure of white working class boys is one of the most disturbing problems we face within the whole education system. Research shows that white working class boys are the least likely to participate in full-time education after the age of 16, and that white boys are the most likely to be completely unqualified on leaving compulsory education.

However it is not the principle underlying comprehensives; ‘the principle of the level playing field’ which has been disproved as the Right would claim, rather that the comprehensives were never that comprehensive, and the level playing field more often than not resembled the north face of the Eiger.

“The comprehensive revolution” as the books’ authors conclude “has not removed the link between education and class - but strengthened it”

Reproduced from RA Bulletin Vol 4, Issue 4, Dec '99/Jan '00

A Curiously English Story..

For Guardian reporter Nick Davies, the comprehensive system is a curiously english story, featuring a little snobbery, a dash of racism and a great deal of class politics. However, as A. Shaw explains, precisely the same ingredients are implicit in his own remedy

“It is perfectly understandable that parents should move heaven and earth to get their children into the best possible schools, whether it means moving house, applying to different boroughs, paying for their children to take entrance exams, appealing to independent adjudicators, taking holy commu­nion before applying to Church schools, even giving false addresses” a London Evening Standard editorial explained recently (29.11.99).

Best schools’ are for the Evening Standard defined as those who ‘attract the good teachers’. The ‘good teachers’ in turn are attracted by the schools with the best ‘facilities’. That ‘good facilities’ plus the ‘good teachers’ in turn attract the ‘bright pupils’ is a simple case of cause and effect. Or so we are led to believe. But what isn’t explained is how the good school acquires the best facilities to begin with? And if the comprehensive system has ‘not removed the link between education and class’ but strengthened it - where in the cycle exactly does the systemic discrimination first kick in?

In a recent report, Nick Davies, Guardian Reporter of the Year, shows precisely how the class discrimination accelerates once the required social segregation is achieved. He takes two schools in Sheffield, both of which became comprehensive in the early 1960’s. He describes it as a “curiously English story... it features a little snobbery a dash of racism and a great deal of class politics”- It begins with the two schools Silverdale and Abbeydale setting out on the road to equality. In the dawn of the comprehensives Abbeydale was ‘the posh school’. But Abbeydale’s new comprehensive catchment area, now took in a slice of a deprived working class neighbour­hood.

No longer protected by the ‘high fence of the II plus’ local kids began to turn up in the playground. Some were black. Instantly, some of the middle classes began to withdraw. By the late 1980’s with the gates thrown open by “parental choice” Abbeydale Grange “suddenly found itself the scene of full blooded white flight”. Middle class parents bought their way into Silverdales catchment area instead. The key to understanding the economic implica­tions is straightforward. Essentially when the children move, they take the money, £2000 a head (government subsidy), for every new pupil - with them. Happily for them, the way the system is structured the high intake always leaves the ‘best school’ a considerable surplus each year which it can invest in improving ‘facilities’. So naturally with the new intake, Silverdale is booming. For the ‘failing school’ the system works exactly in reverse. Within them remaining pupils are doubly punished, few facilities - few staff. Back at Abbeydale as Davies reports “the roof leaks, the drama department has no lights, the cricket team has no pitch, ancient fire damage still scars the walls of the science room, last terms trip to Alton Towers was cancelled because there were no staff to take it, the boiler is broken, the driveway is crumbling and most important, their is a constant nagging shortage of cash for staff”. Nor is it standing still. It is instead, under New Labour according to head Jan Woodhead “becoming worse and worse. More and more polarised. There is a horrendous backlash going to happen and there is a wilful blindness to it”.

Predictably Abbeydale is held up as clear evidence of the failure of the ‘comprehensive ideal’, while Silverdale is used as a stick to beat those who lag behind in league tables. But one way or the other ‘blindness’, wilful of other wise, doesn’t come into it. Socialism for the wealthy, market forces for the poor is, afterall the New Labour philosophy. It is, as the Americans would say, a ‘rigged game’. Moreover, if as Philip Gould insists ‘we are all middle class now, if we all have shared interests and concerns; if there is a level playing field’ what then of the ones that fail? If his and Blairs portrait of Britain is as a meritocracy, then as Polly Toynbee points out “our children must owe their success to their genes, brains and efforts. By implication the poor must lack these attributes” (Guardian 24.9.98)???

The ‘poor genetically lacking certain attributes’ has grave social and political implications. In the immediate term it provides the school system with a green light not only to compound the endemic discrimination within society at large but - in fundamental ways to justify it. In still broader terms, it is to ‘wilfully’ or otherwise embrace the murky world of race and eugenics. And if the ‘poor’ are genetically predisposed to failure what future the welfare state, social housing or localised democracy? All, purely by coincidence at this very moment, being weighed and measured by the New Labour executioner.

Given the amount of evidence it is hugely ironic, (but also not untypical) that it is Davies, the impassioned liberal, who writes so movingly of the plight of the dispossessed who finally closes the circle on them. Davies’ argument constantly stressed, rests on the singular notion of “using the bright middle class children as an asset to be distributed like fertiliser to help the poorer children grow... bright children succeed and, if there are enough of them they spread success to the poorer children... if the bright middle class children are siphoned off into private schools and a minority of state schools like Silverdale the children in the rest of the system will fail” etc. He quotes approvingly a school head who recalls the [feckless - drunken - criminal?] parents of the children who failed to turn up for school during England’s first match in the World Cup last year. “They thought football was more important than school. The trouble is that education is a middle class value which we are trying to operate in a working class culture”. Even poor old Abbeydale is “lucky” according to the head simply because “we still have the support of a few middle class families”.

As Davies acknowledges this study on the “compositional effect” is for the middle class parent “both the thrill and threat of the comprehen­sive schools, the prospect of their bright child either soaring and taking others with it or sinking beneath the weight of other children’s disadvan­tage” (or put another way the thrill of ‘nice but dim’ - with appropriate tutoring - for once being the ‘bright fish’ in the dull working class pool, set against the threat of being exposed, even with the ‘natural’ advantages of ‘genes, brains, and efforts’ as being as dull as dishwater himself).

All in all a mindset not a millions miles from the experi­ment ‘of leavening out the colour’ in Australia in the 1950’s. The idea was that if enough Aboriginal children were fostered with lighter skinned immigrants everyone would in time end up white. This was regarded as the ideal solution to the ‘Aboriginal problem’. ‘Light and bright’ being synonymous, the ‘liberal’ assumption then.

So with Davies, who consistently and inaccu­rately draws the contrast between ‘bright’ (as if the inherent privilege was a mere by-product) and ‘poor’, naturally sees nothing wrong and quite evidently regards it both as valid and personally rewarding, to attempt to after a similar fashion ‘impregnate the working class with middle class values.’

Unfortunately for him, the weight of his own evidence exposes it as a forlorn attempt. To refer to the absence of ‘a level playing field’ while studiously ignoring the class system it reflects, is analogous to addressing the issue of race discrimination in South Africa schools while studiously ignoring the system of apartheid itself. But then ‘the working class only exist’ for Davies ‘as the most suffering class’ and like any good liberal he merely wants, to quote Marx, “to deal with the abuses of society on the same basis that give rise to those abuses”.

All of which helps explain why today, like the matter of race for previous generations, the description ‘working class’ is seen as a term of abuse, not to be mentioned in polite society for fear of causing unnecessary offence. Hypocrite, Davies maybe, but unlike New Labour, cynic he certainly is not. Having himself analysed cause and effect in regard to the bigger picture, he then, with the appropriate hand wringing asks, whether in fact the ‘blighted lives’ might possibly have come about through something other than design? “The comprehensive were attacked at birth by the subtle power of British class and then quietly smothered by the education reforms of the 1980’s” he acknowledges but “did the Tories” he wonders “set out to kill the comprehensives without admitting what they were doing”

‘Not knowing what they were doing’ could never be entered as a plea of mitigation for New Labour. Thatcher once famously remarked that there was “no such thing as society”. She also said “the more you talk about class - or even classlessness -the more you fix it in people’s mind” was a less heralded but no less accurate guide to her personal philosophy. Blair, an admitted admirer, has absorbed the lesson well. And so where Thatcher attacked the working class through the anti-union legislation and forced unemployment, Blair clearly intends to go a step further, and finish the job.

By adopting the Thatcher dictum and making it government policy he confidently expects to exterminate the entire working class politically. But for that to be accomplished the ‘problem’ of the working class must first be made to seem “small and soluble”. Hence the National Statistics Office’s new eight tier social classifications unveiled last year which saw 80% of occupations presented as middle class: That ‘everyone in the future be designated middle class’ - or failing that - ‘untermen­schen’ is the government objective. Any talk of specifically addressing, or as New Labour would see it pandering to the sectional interests (welfare, housing, education) of a class no longer officially recognised, is self-evidently absurd.

An analysis providing in the short term, an instant dividend by making it possible for a dictatorship of the centre to politically ignore the wishes, of (by any criteria) more than one in two of the population. Further proof, if such were needed, of Labour’s general perfidy comes with the reform of the House of Lords. In this instance the hereditary principle ‘nature’, is to loud applause, rejected as undemocratic. The reformed second chamber we are then informed may actually be appointed instead. Thus in one arena ‘natural selection’ is sacrificed, order to allow it to be championed as ‘meritocratic’ in more important areas such as education. Hypocrisy runs deep in all middle class institutions. In New Labour, it practically gallops.

Reproduced from RA Bulletin Volume 4, Issue 5, Feb/March '00

Educated - To Know Our Place

Private education is not just a consequence of class privilege but is a condition for it. J. Reilly illustrates how discrimination is built into the system and why, under New Labour, it is becoming even more pronounced.
 

According to a recent report by the Sutton Trust, working class children have less than ‘one in a hundred chance of reaching the top universities’. On top of that though a mere 7% of all children go to private schools they gobble up 50% of places at Oxford and Cambridge. At the last count this ‘magnificent 7%’ accounted for seven out of nine senior generals; 33 out of 39 most senior judges; more than 120 of the 180 officers graduating from Sandhurst; half of the 18 permanent secretaries running Whitehall; and just under half of the 94 grade three civil servants then aged under 50.Taken together it is such staggering proof of institutionalised class discrimination that it absolutely dwarf’s any known statistics of discrimination based solely on race.

“People tell you there is no class system. Let me tell you there fucking well is!” (Ray Winstone, The Guardian, 14.4.00)

Together with existing discrimination, which has remained more or less constant since the General strike in 1926, there is further evidence to suggest, even the meagre gains made in the interim are being rolled back under New Labour.

Martin Johnson, incoming president of National Association of School Masters/Union of Women Teachers, not normally a bastion of radicalism, puts the charge bluntly: “We are back to selection, a more subtle form of selection which brings in the marvels and mysteries of the middle-class housing market”. This, he went on, “is the policy of a bourgeois prime minister with absolutely no understanding of how ordinary schools work”. (The Guardian, 25.4.00)

What does selection mean in practice? It is built first of all on a simple foundation: the intake of children. Every pupil who wants to enter top girls school Rodean sits an exam. So the private schools are selecting talent from the outset. But they are also developing it. It is no secret why private schools do more for their pupils than state schools. Money. “If the government want state schools to offer what we offer they are going to have to spend on each child something much closer to the fees that our parents pay” says Head Mrs Metham. Roedean is paid £10, 260 a year for a day girl, roughly five times the amount an average comprehensive is given for each pupil. Be in no doubt such institutions do, and are designed to reinforce class privilege and thus power. But if they are so bloody clever to begin with: why all the extras?

“Pupils at a school like Westminster” for instance “enjoy all the lavish benefits, tiny class, sizes personal tuition, nightly prep, awesome library facili­ties and sometimes staff who are cosy with the ways of examining boards” according to Guardian columnist Decca Aikenhead. “The resources are” she reports “literally limitless - and yet a third of Westminster A-level results last year were not Grades A’s”. Given their vulgar advantages - “if already so gifted to begin with” it should, she continues, require “a miracle to end with less than straight A’s but most of them do” In 1996 for example,” Eton sent 60 boys to Oxbridge which sounds impressive. On the other hand 167 boys didn’t get in. If they need all that help just to squeeze a place at Bristol, they are plainly not that clever:’ (The Guardian, 26 3.99)

(Bristol, is ironically one of the universities cited by the Sutton Trust, where the chance “if you are from the less affluent half of the population is only one in 100” – London Evening Standard, 10.4.00)

Though accurate, the observation that the offspring of the rich are not always naturally clever is also ever so slightly to miss the point. It is not the function of the hothouse atmosphere she describes to “actually help individuals to realise their full potential”. Even within these narrow confines egalitarianism is not at all the goal. Of course private education is a consequence of class privilege, but as the earlier statistics show, it is also an essential condition for its preservation. In addition to the veneer of being born to rule; the notional sense of inherent and effortless superiority which is equally carefully fostered, is believed invaluable in sustaining the social and political status quo, particularly in times of crisis. What, in political terms this amounts to is nothing less than a form, though perfectly legal, of - minority rule - in perpetuity.

But how with democratic government is it allowed to continue to happen?

Apart from the usual smoke and mirrors, it is done by creating, as in housing, the national health service and so on, a complete alternative to the comprehensive system. Once established, money and resources are then systematically siphoned off to feather nest the alternative. In the case of education, resources that would otherwise go to the other 93% are ruthlessly plundered to exclusively benefit the children of the rich and influential. There is in Europe at present, no other country where private schools represent a fully-fledged alternative to the schools system. There are now in Britain, no less than 2,300 private schools with an income from fees of £3.2 billion. On top of that many enjoy charitable status and pay no tax on income at all. Which in effect means that the rest of us are - subsidising them. Clearly private education is bought, and paid for by the rest of us, in more ways than one.

All of which allows a school such as Eton to spend £20,000 per annum on a single pupil. Almost nine times the £2,372 allowed for a pupil in a state school.

But this money doesn’t come from nowhere. Simon Szreter an economic historian at St John’s College Cambridge found that in the last 20 years Britain has fallen behind just about every other developed country in its investment in teachers for the state sector. “No other democratically elected government in the modern world” he comments has dreamed up this master stroke of actually disinvesting in the educational resources of the nation”. (The Guardian, 8.3.00)

What’s more during the same 20 years, because the Conservatives were cutting taxes and putting more money into middle class pockets enabling more of them to buy their way into private schools, private schools saw that it was financially and politically advantageous to invest probably for the first time, in actively courting a wider range of pupils. Government policy openly concurred with this. Of course the more under funded, the worse the state sector got, the greater the clamour among the middle classes to be let in to the ‘safe haven’.

That was the Tories right enough. So what has Labour done about it?

Just over 18 months ago, on July 14 1998 David Blunkett, Minister for Education, announced a spending bonanza for schools. “The government is providing an additional £19bn for education over three years from 1999 to 2002”. As the budget for the entire educational establishment in the whole of the UK in 1998 was only £38.3bn this was a huge increase. This he went on, would, in contrast to Tory policy, “give everyone in our society the opportunity to realise their full potential”. In reality for the first two years in power Mr Blunkett actually invested less in education than the Tories had.

So what happened to the £19bn. In reality it never existed. Like New Labour spending on the NHS etc it is all largely a conjuring trick. It works like this.

In year one he had a rise of £3bn. In year two, he had a rise of £3.5bn but he added in the original £3bn, which he would still be paying from year one, and called it a rise of £6.5bn. Then he came to year three when he had a rise of £3.3bn. But he added in the £6.5bn which he had already committed to the budget in the first two years and called it a rise of £9.7bn.Then he stood back and added-up the total - £3bn plus £6.5bn plus £9.7bn. Hey presto! a - £19.2.bn bonanza. But this is not the end of the conjuring. Not even nearly. Not content with the conversion of £9.7bn into £19bn, Blunkett and his ministers have indulged repeatedly in a second kind of scam. This time the money is recycled through a sequence of different announcements by different spokespeople, each time pretending that the unveiling is a fresh investment when in fact its the same old money.

Panorama exposed not too long ago precisely the same trick being pulled on the NHS. But that’s not all. One of Blunket’s proudest achievements, the highly successful scheme to cut the size of classes for infants aged five to seven, is also exposed as fraud. In 1999 the prime minister was pointing to impressive results, with 100,000 more infants in classes under 30.What Tony did not say was that children in every other bracket - nursery, junior, and secondary - were all being taught in classes that were even more overcrowded than when Labour came to power.

Even supposing Labour had the money, would they invest in schooling the many rather than the few?

You have to seriously doubt it. At bottom New Labour are middle class nationalists. Blair himself, genuinely believes in, and actively identifies with the struggles and aspirations of Middle England. With that empathy, comes of course a contempt for all who don’t share those vanities. Bigotry apart, the simple fact is that the money is not there. Rather than face up to it, they choose to pretend that it can be found without the painful business of taking off the middle classes, what Thatcher stole for them, from the working classes. Instead they piss around with half-baked schemes, mouth egalitarian principles, insist ‘poverty is not an excuse’ and attack teachers for not raising standards when the school in many cases is literally falling down around them.

In 1991 for instance, as many as 2,000 state schools contacted the BBC’s ‘Children in Need’ project for money to repair buildings and hire more teachers. Almost a decade later and a full three years in power New Labour have not reversed these cuts. Why?

Simply because estimates of the cost of repairing and replacing buildings which were neglected during the Tory years are estimated to run as high as £20bn.The same estimate coincidentally being quoted for the repairs to council housing after two decades of deliberate neglect. Rather than stump up, Labour has decided to offload council housing instead. Off loading the cost of educating the children of the occupants of the flats is something Labour would also love to do. Again as there can be no talk of restitution in regard to resources, the only question that remains to be answered is how?

One of the principle battering rams used to attack the very IDEA of state schooling, has not been the systematic withdrawal of funding. That was merely the outcome from the posing of the wider philosophical question on whether or not the children of the working class, needed beyond a rudimentary level, to be educated at all. Unless prepared to take on board the reality of existing society, being at a fairly basic level fundamentally unjust, then broadly speaking, everybody is already, with some minor adjustments, in their rightful place. Any attempts to fundamentally alter the status quo, was to fulfil the political ambitions of, in the contemptuous words of Kenneth Baker, those who would “seek to use education for social engineering”.

On the eve of the Second World War working class children were still entitled only to elementary education to the age of 14, with 10% managing to graduate into county grammar schools and the like. And that was it. Now the post war impetus to encourage the working class toward higher educa­tion has stalled. Simply because if you deny the role social justice played in education, you remove any logical justification for universal schooling. Politics apart, it makes no economic sense at all.

Back in 1985 some bureaucrats in Whitehall publicly flew that very kite. Might it not be a good idea they ventured tentatively, if the school leaving age was dropped from 16 to 14.After all, as they explained: “There has to be selection, because we are beginning to create aspirations which society cannot match... if we have a highly educated and idle population we may possibly anticipate more serious social conflict. People must be educated once more to know their place.” (Red Action, issue 20)

American academic Charles Murray author of the Bell Curve would certainly recognise the logic. His highly controversial book published in 1994, is based precisely on the premise that “our place in social pecking order depends on our IQ, which is genetically and racially pre-determined and cannot be much affected by schooling environment or class”. Another who not only agrees in ‘nature over nurture’ but is happy to admit it is “the fundamental roots of my beliefs” (The Guardian, 20.5.00) is BNP leader Nick Griffin. On May 9 under the title The Growing Threat of the Underclass Murray spoke at the Church House in London in a debate sponsored by the Sunday Times. Sharing the platform with him was Home Secretary Jack Straw. Hundred to one against and counting..?